IcTus Gallery Presents “Rituals of Water,” a solo exhibit by Rodney Ewing
January 12 through March 1st, 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 12th, 6pm- 10pm
Closing Artist Talk: Friday, March 1st, 7pm- 9pm
IcTus Gallery is pleased to announce the “Rituals of Water,” a solo exhibition of the works of Rodney Ewing, co-curated by Hanna Regev.
In “Rituals of Water”, Ewing examines the role of water as an allegorical agent of disruption and change in the history of people of African descent. Water as motif figures greatly in the African Diaspora, in the wake of experiences that include abductions, transport onto slave ships, and immersion into an alien culture via baptism that removes traces of past beliefs and traditions. Water has also served as a weapon to scatter activists during the Civil Rights Movement, and as a reckoning and catastrophe for the mostly poor and African American communities of New Orleans living on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River during Hurricane Katrina.
Ewing renders the centuries long sweep of this historical timeline of water and the African Diaspora. Large-scale drawing and installations are captured in four thematic sections: Transition (Middle Passage), Transformation (Baptism), Resistance (Civil Rights Movement), and Dispersal (Hurricane Katrina). With this construct, Ewing has produced a record of how even a basic, mundane element is transformed by a people’s history into a transcendent and at times malevolent force.
Rodney Ewing is an artist working out of San Francisco California. His drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and events. With his work he is pursuing a narrative that requires us to be present and intimate.
Rodney Ewing’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions including “Tech Tools of the Trade: Contemporary Media Art” (de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, 2009) “Art Dubai”, (Frey Norris Gallery) “Public Safety, (Frey Norris Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2008) “Code Switching”,(Red House Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2007), “Who’s Afraid of San Francisco (FreyNorris Gallery 2006), Lisa Dent Gallery (San Francisco, CA 2005), and Cartography (Johnsonese Gallery, Chicago, IL 2005)
